


Jericho

by epistolic



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-27
Updated: 2013-12-27
Packaged: 2018-01-06 08:51:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1104857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epistolic/pseuds/epistolic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Twenty Victors to choose from in District 1, and here the two of them are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jericho

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry, I just have way too many Career feelings ;_____;

When first she is Reaped, and then him, their mother collapses.

Gloss is too busy walking towards the dais to notice. But she sees it: the way the colour leeches out of her mother’s face, white to the roots of her hair, the way her eyes roll back into her head. Their mother is a wisp of a woman, and when she hits the ground she does not make a noise.

Nobody tries to help her up.

She, Cashmere, stares fixedly ahead. When her brother steps up onto the stage, she goes to him. Clasps his body to hers in what the cameras will see as solidarity.

“Smile,” she hisses into his ear; he looks far too dazed. She pinches the soft flesh of his arm. “ _Now_.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she watches as he puts himself together. As he remembers where they are.

He smiles.

\--

The tributes from District 2 are always much too brutal; it is up to District 1, to lend an elegance to slaughter.

Or, at least, this is what they are taught.

Gloss sits on the edge of her bed. He’s hollow-eyed, sleepless, fingers toying restlessly with the gold circlet on his wrist. He looks young. He does not look as if he could be older than she is. He does not look like the boy who once carried her on his back through the house, squealing happily, rattling up the stairs, Mother chasing after them with a balled-up apron, _Get back here, the two of you, there are dishes to dry_ , the lovely smell of new polish on the wooden floors, the sunshine scent of his hair. 

“You have to do it,” Gloss says finally.

“Don’t be like that.”

“You have to. You know I couldn’t.” He looks up at her. “Please.”

“Maybe they’ll make an exception,” she says. “Like last year.”

“They won’t.”

Her fingers clench. She’s close to tearing a hole in the sheets, and she knows it.

“We shouldn’t be thinking about this,” she says at last. “We should be thinking about strategy. Sponsors. Our image. How we’re going to approach this. Do you think – ”

“It isn’t fair,” Gloss interrupts. “It isn’t fucking _fair_.”

Twenty Victors to choose from in District 1, and here the two of them are. She falls quiet; her heart isn’t in it anyway, in puzzling out the cold logistics of survival. Deep down in her ribcage she knows that out of the two of them she has the better speed, the better aim, the better mind for traps. The better chance.

“One of us has to make it back,” her brother says. 

She understands him: they are all their mother has left in the world. She sees again that ashy face, that boneless slump into the gravel. They had not been allowed to say goodbye.

She leans her body against his and she cries.

\--

When Gloss was in the Arena, she had done anything and everything.

Her mother had taken her hands in her own. Kissed them. Tears fell on her palms, on her limp fingers; she hadn’t known what to do with her mother’s grief, had been too young to think outside the sphere of her own despair.

“Please,” her mother had whispered. “Please.”

Afterwards, she had leant against the sink of her bathroom. The windows of her apartment – temporary; for Mentors only – opened out to a breath-taking view of the Capitol: the sweeping avenues, lights blinking through the clear night, hovercrafts and chariots and old-fashioned four-wheel cars weaving past the pedestrians. In the mirror her face had been pale and wan. Her hair tangled, rough, tumbled out of its pins and ribbons; her neck and arms unmarked, but her belly deeply bruised, the cuts of the whip leaping out in wheals on the skin of her buttocks.

She had been sore between her thighs. It would be a feeling that would not fade for months; only later would she learn that she would never have children.

It hadn’t mattered, not any more. Gloss had come home.

\--

She passes Johanna Mason in the corridor on the morning of the Tribute Parade. It’s still strange to see Johanna like this: burnished to a high sheen, like she’s been dipped in lacquer.

The look on Johanna’s face is one of utter contempt. “Going with the princess theme again?”

“Well, you know I don’t have your stylist’s creativity,” she says, smiling. Showing teeth. Her eyes travel lazily over Johanna’s costume. “You’re wearing – what? Is that meant to be bark? So original. So unexpected. But then, I hear you’ve always been one for breaking the rules.”

Johanna watches her, eyes sharp and narrowed.

Johanna hates her, she knows. They all do. For being prepared. For entering that Arena with a good ten years of training under her belt. 

They assume that this training is enough. It isn’t. It never has been.

“A shame about your brother,” Johanna says at last. 

Her smile tightens. “A shame about this entire Quell thing, no?”

“What, you Careers feel it too? I thought you guys would lap it right up.”

“We don’t enjoy killing any more than you do, Johanna Mason,” she says calmly. “Or perhaps – that isn’t a good example. I remember watching your Games. Your first kill. A lot bloodier than it needed to be. That trick you pulled – at least we Careers are honest about ourselves. We go in as we are. None of us had to lie in order to win.”

“No, you just casually butcher everybody from the word go.”

She sees red. She is so abruptly furious her entire body hums with it, a vibration that threatens to shake her bones apart.

“You think you guys have the worst of it?” she hisses. To her credit, Johanna doesn’t take a step back; not even when she’s caged in against the wall. “Sure, you guys go in at a disadvantage – but when you come out, _if_ you come out, you don’t ever have to go back to the Academy and tell a whole legion of fresh-faced _kids_ that the highest thing they can aspire to in their lives is to go through the hell you just went through. You don’t ever have to watch these kids _volunteer_. You don’t ever have to watch them _win_. You just watch them die. And to be honest?” She leans in, making sure Johanna hears it: “Now that I’ve been there? _I’d rather watch them die_.”

There’s a ringing silence for a moment. Johanna’s eyes dart over her face, no heat in them, just quietly assessing.

Then Johanna plants a hand on her chest and shoves her roughly back.

“You want to know the real reason why I hate you Careers?” Johanna says. Her eyes glitter in the unnatural light of the fluorescents. “Because you, more than any of us, can see the problem. But none of you are brave enough to do anything about it.”

She can feel her nails cutting into her palms. “And, what, _you’re_ doing something about it?”

“Yes,” Johanna says. “We are.”

\--

“I don’t like this,” Gloss says.

She tracks him with her eyes. A habit she’s had since childhood. “Stop pacing around. Come here.”

“I don’t trust them, Cash. And, let’s face it, they don’t trust us either. We so much as look at them funny for a second and they’ll stab us right in the back.”

“Look, just sit down for a minute, alright?”

“Think about it – Johanna Mason? The one who went in snivelling like a baby and came out a Victor? She’s a liar through and through. You can’t believe a word she says. And don’t get me started on Finnick Odair.” He stops abruptly, snatches at the hand in her lap. “We can’t do this. They hate us. Please, Cash, we can’t.”

She feels suddenly tired. Gloss is squeezing her knuckles hard enough to hurt.

“Gloss. I didn’t promise them anything.”

“Snow doesn’t care about us anyway. He only cares about the Twelves. You saw the way he was watching them today in the Parade, he only wants them dead. We can still make it out. We can still make it home.”

It’s so strange – Gloss is older than her, but she feels a responsibility for him so heavy sometimes it threatens to drown her. This baby brother of hers; this heart so easily bruised, his smile so sweet when they had been children, who’d kissed her and soothed her when she’d skinned her knees; she’d watched for that pinpoint moment in the Arena when every tribute first discovers death and she’d seen his heart break for a second, staring down at the unmoving boy beneath his knife, something terrible and open flashing through his face a split second before he’d remembered the cameras.

Her mother’s face wafts up before her: _Please_.

“Alright,” she, Cashmere, says. She pulls him to her: she loves him so fiercely she feels almost blind. “Alright. We’ll go in alone. And we’ll make it out.”

\--

She doesn’t remember much about her father: but she remembers this.

On the day before Gloss turned six, a conference. The inside of her father’s study. The heavy bookshelves, all grainy woods, carved and whittled into animals and vines and flowers. Nobody else had bookshelves like that; they were not in fashion.

Her father’s smell, leather and cigarette smoke. His warmth, as he held her in his lap. She’d never felt so safe in all her life; here she was hidden, she was loved, she was protected.

“You must look after your brother,” her father had said. Whispered it into her hair. “Promise me.”

“I promise, Daddy.”

“Gloss isn’t as strong as you. Even though he’s older.”

She’d frowned up at him. “But he always wins our arm wrestling competitions.”

“Life isn’t just about arm wrestling, Cash.” She’d jumped at this: something wet had landed on her cheek, something that had not come from her. “Life is – hard. It’s much harder than you think. And unfair. Things will happen, and you won’t understand why they happen, why you must go places and do things to other people that you don’t want to do. But that’s what life is about. That’s what being strong is about, Cash.”

She’d thought about this, solemnly, for a second. “Okay.”

“So you have to promise to be strong. I know you can be.”

“I’ll be strong, Daddy, I promise.”

He’d held her for a long moment more. She’d burrowed her face into his shirt, into the reassuring familiarity of him. She was his favourite: he brought little trinkets home for her every day from the factory, held her hand whenever they crossed the road, sat up with her whenever she had nightmares.

Something wet fell on her cheek again. “I love you very much, Cash, you know that?”

“Yes, Daddy,” she’d said. “I know.”

The next day, the men from the Academy had come.

\--

When Katniss Everdeen puts an arrow into Gloss’ chest, she screams.

It comes out of her: a shrill, inhuman sound. Mingling with the cannon. Brutus is tugging at her arm, trying to pull her back, but a sudden strength comes into her that she’s never had before; she throws him off, launches her body out from behind the rocks.

She can see her death laid plain in Johanna Mason’s eyes. 

She throws herself forward to meet it.

**Author's Note:**

> For updates on any future fics, feel free to add me on [Tumblr](http://epistolica.tumblr.com), [LiveJournal](http://epistolic.livejournal.com), or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/#!/epistolic)! ♥


End file.
